Sunday, July 29, 2012

This Week in the Book Pages: How to Dream Big, Make Enemies, and Write About It Later

This week in the New York Times book pages: a series of essays on "how to write" (here's the first). Writing blurbs, of course, is a special art. This essay by A.J. Jacobs may not be "wildly creative," to use one of his blurbing phrases, but it is amusing.

As a historian, Kazin, despite his sober judgments, exaggerates the
importance of some radicals even as he ignores others’ genuine
achievements—and does so at liberalism’s expense. His view of history
acknowledges but diminishes the debt radicals have owed to liberals—just
as it blinds him to the damage some leftists have willfully done over
the last thirty years to liberal ideals and, ironically, to their own.

I've pulled the last paragraph, which is a bit unfair to Kazin. Read the review in full here (open access).

[Coll] documents the political, economic and global power of
ExxonMobil, the largest privately owned oil and gas company in the
world. Coll frames his story as a narrative of corporate life in the
post–cold war era. The choice may feel odd at first: despite the
company’s wealth—it has quadrupled its profits in the years since the
cold war’s end—oil seems old-fashioned, mired in the physical world.
Coll compares it with Walmart and Google, those denizens of the
postindustrial economy. In contrast to these, ExxonMobil drills “holes
in the ground,” and so its operations are inevitably “linked to the
control of physical territory.” In this way, he suggests a different
view of the contemporary economy: beneath the glitz and seductions of
the service sector runs a river of oil, sluicing through the bright
weightlessness of our online dreams.